Jeff Bezos owns this newspaper and has a deeply vested interest in keeping wages low.
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A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
51–60 of 235 posts
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#52tldr; * The study uses more precise data than similar prior studies and comes to a sharply different conclusion. * Economists generally want to disbelieve this study, because the results aren't promising, but the method used is largely credible and the data is more precise. * The impact, according to the study, is that to compensate for the higher wages employers are continuing to hire but only highly skilled candida…
"Economists" want to disbelieve the study? Can you support that with evidence? There are definitely liberal economists and conservative economists, but I don't think it's at all clear that the mainstream of economists broadly support a sharply increased minimum wage.
Nope. It is the sensation I (myself) got from reading the article.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#53Opponents of a minimum wage need only believe that increasing the price of a thing tends to proportionally decrease the demand for that thing. This is simply a statement of the law of supply and demand, which is (though weaker) the economic equivalent of physics' F=MA.
Proponents of a minimum wage need to believe that in this particular case, raising a price does not proportionally decrease demand. While this may be true (economics ain't physics), the burden of proof lies with the proponents, since it would be a contradiction of probably the most well established "law" of economics.
If you feel that the data in this and similar studies are inconclusive, to the extent that you respect the discipline of economics, you should oppose a minimum wage.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#54There is an excellent free (and very short) book, "Economics in one lesson" by Henry Hazlitt, which explains very logically why minimum wage, rent controls and other "band-aid" economical measures always end badly:
https://mises.org/system/tdf/Henry%20Hazlitt%20Economics%20i...
It is like 2-hour reading, but very enlightening.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#55"Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average o…
First, just from skimming I see that this hasn't been peer reviewed yet.
Second, it is coming from WaPo which is a very neoliberal, anti-worker paper (see the 900 anti Bernie Sanders stories it put out right as he was gaining momentum vs the neoliberal, anti-minimum-wage Clinton).
Third, the fact that people are "earning less" could also be interpreted as meaning that the people are earning enough to take some time off for leisure, which has many benefits both monetary and otherwise.
Fourth, it appears there were exclusions of large-scale corporations with facilities inside and outside of the city, which seems to miss the main target of a raised minimum: the corporations which can objectively easily afford it, and who employ the lion's share of workers in major cities.
Finally, this non-pier-reviewed, dubiously filtered study goes against the vast majority of research on the subject performed to date. Not to mention it violates common sense, which says that our incredible increase in worker productivity should have seen corollary rises in worker pay over the last 40 years. In fact, we have seen the opposite.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not intelligent enough to say either way. I do think that excluding them was a good idea. If the only businesses that can survive a law are massive multi-national corporations, we've got a problem...
That's a separate issue, also worthy of study. But it does seem ridiculous to assume the validity of a study of low-wage workers in Seattle while omitting data from companies like Starbucks that presumably employ many people affected by the change.
The reason they excluded it was because the data they were provided for those companies did not differentiate between workers in Seattle and workers outside. That said the economics of hiring an extra shouldn't be significantly different for a big company. Costco and Starbucks probably have some wiggle room to cut down on the number of staff at a certain time.
Also, to quote from the study: "as shown in Table 2, in Washington State as a whole, single-site businesses comprise 89% of firms and employ 62% of the entire workforce (which includes 2.7 million employees in an average quarter)" [2]."
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#57If your business cannot pay employees a livable wage, it does not deserve to exist.
Thanks largely to the internet, fewer and fewer can.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#58The problem I have with the minimum wage is that it transfers wealth from the very poorest to the mid-working class/lower middle class. Who am I to tell a homeless person that she is legally forbidden to engage in a voluntary, hourly employment contract for less than $15/hr? I would effectively be guaranteeing that she stays unemployed/homeless. Regardless of practical effects (which are ambiguous at best), it's wron…
You aren't telling the homeless person that they are legally forbidden from working in cheap labor. You are telling businesses that they are not solvent if they rely on ultra cheap labor.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#59Granted, I'm a redneck from the back woods, but there are lots of people I know that don't make $15/hour in skilled trades, let alone minimum wage jobs. If you're going to pay minimum wage of $15, then all other wagesshould correspondingly increase
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#60There is an excellent free (and very short) book, "Economics in one lesson" by Henry Hazlitt, which explains very logically why minimum wage, rent controls and other "band-aid" economical measures always end badly: https://mises.org/system/tdf/Henry%20Hazlitt%20Economics%20i... It is like 2-hour reading, but very enlightening.
And very ideologically biased...